This book offers an in-depth analysis of the cognitive and ethical role of emotion, particularly empathy, in medical practice. The author explains how doctors can use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients without jeopardizing their objectivity or projecting their own values on to patients.

In this article I draw on personal experience to explore the kinds of relationships that can develop between human and nonhuman animals. The first part of the article describes my encounters with wild baboons, whom I studied in East Africa over the course of many years. The baboons treated me as a social being, and to gain their trust I had to learn the troop's social conventions and behave in accordance with them. This process gave me a feeling for what (...) it means to be a baboon. Over time, I developed a sense of belonging to their community, and my subjective identity seemed to merge with theirs. This experience expanded my sense of the possible in interspecies relations. The second part of the article describes a mutual exploration of such possibilities in my relationship with my dog, Safi. I describe how Safi and I co-create systems of communication and emotional expression that permit deep 'intersubjectivity', despite our very different biological natures. In my relationships with baboons, dogs, and other animals, I have encountered the presence in another of something resembling a human 'self'. I emphasize the importance of recognizing and honoring this presence in other animals as well as in humans. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist-constructivist antirepresentationalism (...) in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4E” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced. (shrink)

Chronic and current epistemological controversies, with particular attention to the development of pragmatist/historicist/constructivist reconceptions of knowledge and science in the 20th century and the scandalized responses to them by defenders of more traditional rationalist/objectivist/realist conceptions. Individual chapters deal with complex and confused relations among epistemic skepticism, relativism, and constructivist epistemology ; 20th-century "postmodern" relativism and anti-relativism; Ludwik Fleck and constructivist views of truth, science, and knowledge; attacks on and disavowals of constructivism and/or relativism by established and feminist philosophers; the Science (...) Wars and fraught relations between the humanities and the sciences; the problematic claims of Evolutionary Psychology; and chronic problems and contemporary views of animal-human relations. (shrink)

Unrealistic therapeutic beliefs are very common—the majority of patient-subjects enrol in phase 1 trials seeking and expecting significant medical benefit, even though the likelihood of such benefit has historically proven very low. The high prevalence of therapeutic misestimation and unrealistic optimism in particular has stimulated debate about whether unrealistic therapeutic beliefs in early-phase clinical trials preclude adequate informed consent. We seek here to help resolve this controversy by showing that a crucial determination of when such therapeutic beliefs are ethically problematic (...) turns on whether they are causally linked and instrumental to the motivation to participate in the trial. Thus, in practice, it is ethically incumbent on researchers to determine which understanding and beliefs lead to the participant’s primary motivation for enrolling, not to simply assess understanding, beliefs and motivations independently. We further contend that assessing patient-subjects’ appreciation as a component of informed consent—it is already an established component of decision-making capacity assessments—can help elucidate the link between understanding-beliefs and motivation; appreciation refers to an individual’s understanding of the personal significance of both the medical facts and the experience of trial participation. Therefore, we recommend that: in addition to the usual question, ‘Why do you want to participate in this trial?’, all potential participants should be asked the question: ‘What are you giving up by participating in this trial?’ and researchers should consider the settings in which it may be possible and practical to obtain ‘two-point consent’. (shrink)

Galles & Pearl (l998) claimed that s [possible-worlds] framework.s framework. Recursive models are shown to correspond precisely to a subclass of (possible-world) counterfactual structures. On the other hand, a slight generalization of recursive models, models where all equations have unique solutions, is shown to be incomparable in expressive power to counterfactual structures, despite the fact that the Galles and Pearl arguments should apply to them as well. The problem with the Galles and Pearl argument is identified: an axiom that they (...) viewed as irrelevant, because it involved disjunction (which was not in their language), is not irrelevant at all. (shrink)

The field of science communication is plagued by challenges. Communicators face the difficulty of responding to unjustified public skepticism over issues like climate change and COVID-19 while also acknowledging the fallibility and limitations of scientific knowledge. Our goal in this paper is to suggest a new model for science communication that can help foster more productive, respectful relationships among all those involved in science communication. Inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, we develop an experience model, according to which (...) science communication consists in people’s experiences with science and the meanings they develop from those experiences. Three principles are central to the model: experience is cumulative, context matters, and audiences have agency. We argue that this model has significant implications both for communication research and practice, which we illustrate by applying it to the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. We show how science communicators can help to identify and alleviate structural factors that contribute to skepticism as well as fostering opportunities for meaning making around shared experiences. (shrink)

The question of whether knowledge is definable in terms of belief, which has played an important role in epistemology for the last 50 years, is studied here in the framework of epistemic and doxastic logics. Three notions of definability are considered: explicit definability, implicit definability, and reducibility, where explicit definability is equivalent to the combination of implicit definability and reducibility. It is shown that if knowledge satisfies any set of axioms contained in S5, then it cannot be explicitly defined in (...) terms of belief. S5 knowledge can be implicitly defined by belief, but not reduced to it. On the other hand, S4.4 knowledge and weaker notions of knowledge cannot be implicitly defined by belief, but can be reduced to it by defining knowledge as true belief. It is also shown that S5 knowledge cannot be reduced to belief and justification, provided that there are no axioms that involve both belief and justification. (shrink)

Socialism and Feminism in the 19th century.

ABSTRACT Amidst trends that emphasize languishing patterns in teen mental health, there is a bright spot: social science research indicates that adolescents who develop relationships with adult mentors demonstrate increased signs of flourishing. This social science research on mentors, though limited to school performance outcome goals, offers a lifeline to character educators. I offer a theoretical framework based on Aristotelian principles, informed by anecdotal case studies of authentic moral dilemmas that emerged from the direct experiences of mentees, to suggest a (...) framework to explain why adolescents with adult mentors have an advantage. Patterns of conversation in trusted mentoring relationships developed over time, and in a school context that provides sufficient professional development for mentors, support the youth: (1) to advance in practical wisdom (phronesis) by honing skills for emotional regulation as well as cognitive skills to recognize goods in conflict and (2) to learn how to engage in civic friendship through these friendships of inequality with mentors. (shrink)

There have been two major lines of research aimed at capturing resource-bounded players in game theory. The first, initiated by Rubinstein (), charges an agent for doing costly computation; the second, initiated by Neyman (), does not charge for computation, but limits the computation that agents can do, typically by modeling agents as finite automata. We review recent work on applying both approaches in the context of decision theory. For the first approach, we take the objects of choice in a (...) decision problem to be Turing machines, and charge players for the “complexity” of the Turing machine chosen (e.g., its running time). This approach can be used to explain well-known phenomena like first-impression-matters biases (i.e., people tend to put more weight on evidence they hear early on) and belief polarization (two people with different prior beliefs, hearing the same evidence, can end up with diametrically opposed conclusions) as the outcomes of quite rational decisions. For the second approach, we model people as finite automata, and provide a simple algorithm that, on a problem that captures a number of settings of interest, provably performs optimally as the number of states in the automaton increases. (shrink)

Natural conditions are provided that are sufficient to ensure that causality as defined by approaches that use counterfactual dependence and structural equations will be transitive.

Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting integration often (...) involve dubious teleological models of intellectual history and betray limited understandings of the distinctive epistemic orientations and cultural functions of the humanities vis-à-vis the sciences. Recurrent institutional difficulties encountered by scholars and/or scientists in hybrid fields reflect steep prestige differentials between the humanities and sciences, along with significant differences of training, experience, style, and temperament. Meanwhile, both the sciences and humanities are being shaken up by technological and related intellectual developments. Though worrisome, the new disciplinary configurations are thus likely to play out in surprising and, not inconceivably, positive ways. (shrink)

Dworkin's theoretical disagreement argument, developed in Law's Empire, is presented in that work as the motivator for his interpretive account of law. Like Dworkin's earlier arguments critical of legal positivism, the argument from theoretical disagreement has generated a lively exchange with legal positivists. It has motivated three of them to develop innovative positivist positions. In its original guise, the argument from theoretical disagreement is presented as ‘the semantic sting argument’. However, the argument from theoretical disagreement has more than one version. (...) This article briefly discusses two versions and the leading replies to them, then focuses on the most influential version, directed at Hartian positivism. The article surveys the leading positivist rejoinders to the recast version, indicating key Dworkinian replies or assessing the strength of these rejoinders, and concludes with a rejoinder of its own, making a new case that the argument from theoretical disagreement isn't fatal for Hartian legal positivism. (shrink)

A familiar jurisprudential view is that a judicial decision functions as a legal precedent by laying down a rule and that the content of this rule is set by officials. Precedents can be followed only by acting in accordance with this rule. This view is mistaken on all counts. A judicial decision functions as a precedent by being an example. At its best, it is an example both for officials and for a target population. Even precedents outside of law function (...) as examples when they have conduct-guiding significance. Examples may be rule-like in their scope, but need not be. Their import is independent of their justification; this point has implications for coherence theories of precedent meaning. The content and scope of a legal decision’s extension is not set exclusively by officials. It is socially set and depends upon social salience. (shrink)

An examination of conceptually and rhetorically equivocating positions among academic philosophers and other theorists who are sympathetic to constructivist epistemological developments but unwilling to relinquish key aspects of traditional understandings of truth and knowledge and/or anxious to avoid charges of relativism. A major problem with the resulting hybrid formulations is that, seeking, as they often claim, to “steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis” and being composed of essentially incompatible elements, they can do little theoretical work. While the personal-intellectual and (...) professional-institutional pressures leading to such dubious navigations are substantial, so also, it is argued, are their intellectual costs. (shrink)

I reply here to an article by philosopher Paul Boghossian in which my article "Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology" (Smith, *SAQ* 2002) provides him with an occasion for a supposed exposure and refutation of the alleged illogic of the "unpalatable relativism" of what Boghossian, at some distance from his topic, (mis)understands as the "constructivism" of contemporary sociology of science.

Everyone agrees that law is a constituent of social reality. Law seems to be a system by which conduct is governed and guided. Its usefulness consists, in part, on its ability to govern and guide conduct in its characteristic way. If laws guides the conduct of lay law subjects, then it must be (really) possible for the content of the laws governing their conduct to be known by them under standard social conditions. Moreover, if some degree of efficacy in guiding (...) and governing the conduct of lay law subjects is an existence condition for a legal system, then in existing legal systems enough of the content of directive law is epistemically accessed by enough law subjects so that they can apply it to their situations and correctly determine the act-tokens required of them. In this chapter, I argue that these modest epistemic reflections have important implications for a theory of legal content that have been largely ignored. Holistic theories of legal content, such as Greenberg’s and Dworkin’s, are inconsistent with an adequate account of epistemic access. After demonstrating the same problem in two mainstream non-holistic theories of legal content -- the view that legal content is set entirely by official interpretive conventions, and the view that legal content is set entirely by official intentions – I propose a theory of legal content that meets the epistemic access challenge. On my approach, law is, at its core, centered upon the understandings of law subjects. (This view is meant to exempt constitutional provisions.) More precisely, the legal content of statutes and judicial decisions is built around, and preserves, a core of understandings and meaning-assignments that is the province of anyone with sufficient linguistic ability and relevant socialization. The details of this view are, roughly: (1) in the case of judicial decisions in a common law system, the social salience of the example the decision sets concerning behavior sets the default legal content; (2) in the case of statutory directives, the set of socially salient applications (behavior in situations) sets the default legal content. I say `default’ because my account of legal content is a two-stage account beginning with the default content and permitting a second stage in which considerations from other sources can operate on the default. Yet if a certain amount of efficacy in guiding lay law subjects’ behavior is a requirement for the existence of a legal system, there must be a core of legal content undistorted from its default social salience by a second stage operation. There is and must be a `law of the street’. -/- . (shrink)

We consider a setting where a decision maker’s uncertainty is represented by a set of probability measures, rather than a single measure. Measure-by-measure updating of such a set of measures upon acquiring new information is well known to suffer from problems. To deal with these problems, we propose using weighted sets of probabilities: a representation where each measure is associated with a weight, which denotes its significance. We describe a natural approach to updating in such a situation and a natural (...) approach to determining the weights. We then show how this representation can be used in decision making, by modifying a standard approach to decision making—minimizing expected regret—to obtain minimax weighted expected regret. We provide an axiomatization that characterizes preferences induced by MWER both in the static and dynamic case. (shrink)

This paper will examine the effects of gender, age, work experience, academic status and legality on certain ethical decisions. Six scenarios representing ethical dilemmas were presented to both undergraduate and MBA students in an attempt to determine if various demographic factors influenced ethical decision making. While some past studies have suggested that gender has an important effect on ethical decision making, this study does not completely support this conclusion and suggests that age and/or length of work experience should be included (...) in any study of ethical decision making.The legality of the decisions was determined and compared to the reason given by the students for their decisions. In some cases the choice made by a majority of the students was not the one that was supported by the legal authorities which suggests that there may be conflicts between the ethical system of the respondents and the behavior expected of them by society. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 1-4.

I show how thinking in terms of the protocol used can help clarify problems related to anthropic reasoning and self-location, such as the Doomsday Argument and the Sleeping Beauty Problem.

The present article examines the potential effects on the translation process of working interactively with a translation memory system, a tool for storing and sharing previous translations. A TM system automatically divides the source text into sentences presented to the translator one-by-one. Based on observations made in an empirical study of six professional translators and six translation students, it is argued that full sentences do not constitute a central cognitive processing category in translation, and that the sentence-by-sentence presentation inherent in (...) TM systems therefore creates an unnaturally strong focus on the sentence, which affects the very task of translation. Particular attention is given to the impact of the use of TM systems on the informants’ revision behaviour and their tendency to change the sentence structure. (shrink)